Profiting with Tradeskills

[Threndor]

I GM'd out Brewing a little while ago, and my Demi-Sec Champagne have been selling well at 90pp each on MT. (I had/have a LOT to sell, last batch was close to 100 and I am down to 30 or so I think.)

[Obina]

Yikes! all of those sell a lot higher on Lanys. On lanys it's more like idol = 900, stein = 275, robe = 700, rod = 900, sickle = 2000, pie = 20, mtp = 8-10, champagne = 50, cabbage unsure. i could be wrong on the sickle since i haven't checked it lately, but the rest i am sure on.

So then one can make money on any of these on Lanys! I didn't explain well perhaps ops: . These "standard prices" are not ment to be the sale price, they are ment to be the break even price. At the prices you quote, people can make a nice profit on any of the trade skills. Using the Obina server index (version 1.1) I'd say Smithing or Pottery looks like the best bet on Lanys! Robe could be nice if you can find an enchanter with AA points who can make Gem Studded Chains for 250 pp. (At 250 JC, I'm only 50% success on the GSC since I have no Jewelry AA points)

(Lets not turn this thread into a 9 gifts sale price on all servers Insight into break even price, or of other items for the index is of course welcome)

[Reflan]

Another cheer for brewing. You need to do a lot of brewing to make some of the gifts, and then there is a brewing gift all by itself. Brewing is also fast and incredibly cheap to GM. You can go from 1 to 248 without every leaving shadowhaven.

As a GM smith, I need tempers for my Tae Ew(I make huge quantities of the weapons and armor and the shield) and ogre/troll cultural by the dozens each week. Just did 16 shield combines yesterday, and I'm about to do three more today. I'd do more, but I'm running out of Tae Ew blood. I'm waiting for the patch to go through on Wednesday before doing dozens more combines, all of which need multiple brewing combines, on more ogre/troll cultural plate.

[Silound]

Sort of reminiscing (sp?) here, but probably the best cash I ever made in tradeskills was during hte great frog twinkathon. I sold out of Human BD cult, Shadowscream, Fine plate, and anything else I had vendor mined up and put out for rediculous prices. Made near 40k. then blew most of it on more tradeskills and a WDS

Silound
Who says new expansions aren't great?

[Wandor]

I understand that you need to have a very high skill to make money. Just wondering which of the skills has the best options at 250 to make money that doesn't involve killing planar level mobs.

This is the real question. For each server it is different, but there will still be a basic pattern that follows depending on the supply of high level items available on your server.

The best money makers will always be the hard to make, hard to get items - elemental plane items are at the top of the heap currently. You can still make good money from other PoP items, but anything that is made from the open zones is dropping in price quickly as more and ore people hit the planes. On my server, Bloodmetal earrings where going for 40-50k a month ago. Since then, half a dozen guilds or more have figured out how to beat the Behemoth so they are coming into the market at a much faster rate. They now are selling for 25-30k.

Outside of PoP, I would say that Tae Ew items and BD cultural are the way to go. There is still a prety good mark up on them due to the difficulty in getting 250 smithing and the retarded amount of farming it takes to make these items. While prices are still at a profitable level, they are dropping due to the higher quality items coming from PoP. A few short months ago, a cultural BP would cost you 30k on my server. Now the more common ones are down to 12-15k.

If your server is very young you may find some profit in Solstice earring gifts. Unfortunately, many people who do the Aid Grimel quest use the various gifts as skill up methods so this market tends to crash as you get a few guilds into the elemental planes. If there is still a good market, then do some research and find the trade that is the most profit per unit sold and work on that asap. This market is very fragile, one person going Aid Grimel can kill the prices overnight. On my server, the Solstice robes are selling for 50pp. You read right, 50pp. Thats about 20% of the cost of making a gem studded chain.

Keep in mind that no matter which of those options you choose, you are going to put out a lot of plats to GM any skill other than baking, JC, and brewing. If you take too long GMing, prices could drop out from under your market making it very hard to get your investment back.

The only sure way to make money on trades is to not actually do a trade, but rather supply the people who are doing them. Farming acrylia, velium, spider silks, spider threads, pelts of all types and making celestial essense, heady kiolas, various tempers, and imbued gems are all highly profitable. I know that on an average tradeskill night I will drop 10-15k on supplies that I am buying in the bazaar - sometime more if I feel like doing a particularly lare run of combines. Last night I bought out the entire bazaar of small piece of velium - at a cost of about 20k plats.

I know I am not the only person doing that. My server has 3 guilds in the elemental planes and I would bet at least 2 dozen people are working on the Aid Grimel quest. This kills the market for most player made items, but it makes the market heavily demand driven for the common items used in skilling up.

Like someone else said, do not do trade skills for profit - the market is too fickle to guarantee you will ever see a profit after the huge investment of time and plats.

[Zacatac]

I'd go with the low stuff in mass quanties to start off.

Celestial essense (no-fail combine), cost under 2pp to make. Sell them at 4pp and double your money.

Leather padding, silk swatches, etc. Anything that requires (a) farming and (b) very easy combines.

There is a guy on my server selling the Blessed Dust of Tunare for 50pp each (total cost, about 20pp). He's making a killing! Everyone (me included) is trying to skill up on Solstice robes. Making the dust requires-
1. Cleric or druid to imbue emeralds (very time-consuming)
2. Making celestial essense (easy, but still time-consuming)
3. Combining the imbued emerald + celestial essense + jar of acid (purchased) in kiln (pottery skill check).

He had over 400 of the one day! (just makes my wrist hurt thinking about it). The next day he had less that 100 left.

I made my money by being the best High Elf Smith around. I do have some other people selling armor, but I was the 1st to make the BD cultural and I'm still the only one at 250 as far as I know.

[racquet13]

Ok I think I'm going to try to bring Brewing up to 240, it's at 184 right now. From there, what items can I make for profit? Dyes, tempers, Grobb Liquidated Meat, Kaladim Constitutional, anything else I'm missing? As for supplying a trade with items (spiderling silk, celestial essence, heady kiola) which of these do you think would net the best pp/hour? I can get about 250-300 hour farming in HHK in the off-hours. Would any farmed items beat this?

[Reflan]

Well, Gukta is farmed to near oblivion on many servers, like mine, so it's not a gold mine the way it used to be. There's a druid/wizzy portal to south ro on one side of Innothule swamp and the druid portal to Feerrott on the other side, and Feerrott also has a stone you can use in POK, so getting to Gukta is not a big deal. Use South Ro or Feerrot to check Gukta occasionally.

You can still sometimes come up with a stack or two of spiderling silks pretty quickly there. The vendors there often will have some zombie skins on them too. These sell like lightning to people doing pottery vials to skill up pottery. I sell out of them almost instantly at 1pp or 2pp, but have some people selling them at 5pp with great success. I'm done with pottery, I don't care - more power to them, I guess. Anyway, to dig up goodies like zombie skins and silks, you sometimes have to buy out vendor stock so they rise up in place in a vendors arsenal of junk- filled slots. Nicely, many things on Gukta vendors that take up slots cost almost nothing -- a couple of silver each for various bug parts, etc. Buy and destroy sometimes if you can afford it, till a juicy slot comes up full of goodies.

Neriak also tends to have a good supply of zombie skins, and often has silks and pelts, too. You'd need a an evil or neutral to go there, though, but there's no reason you can't make a level 1 dark elf to do your shopping there for you.

Silks, pelts, and zombie skins seem to sell really well for me. Or you can combine things into higher level components, like combine spiderling silks to make threads if they sell more when combined than separate, maybe the same thing with regular silks - make swatches.

Tempers -- celestial essences sell like gangbusters on most servers. Tae ew temper combines, for the shield/weapons there's scale temper, and for the legs/tunic it's two tae ew bloods and a distilled mana -- are a product people can use to have fun gambling whether they can make a tae ew item on the cheap instead of paying full price for a completed item. People often try using the tempers to do the smithing combines at ridiculously low skill levels. There might as well be somebody making a buck off it. Smithing GM's like me who might make dozens of tae ew items a week, and other smaller scale smiths, would consider buying scale tempers or distilled lizard blood tempers at a good price so we wouldn't have to scrounge around for components and could just drum up a couple or a dozen shields in 10 minutes instead of running all over the bazaar paying inflated prices for each subcomponent and then wasting time doing the brewing. You'd have to keep the prices of the finished product in mind, though, and the failure rate. Talk to your local smiths and watch the market for finished tae ew product. It's not uncommon to fail one out of 4 or 5 tae ew shields as a max smith, though you often go twice as long or more before getting a failure. Just yesterday, though, failed 3 out of 16 combines. Could I buy tempers from you at that kind of failure rate and still make an acceptable profit selling the final shields/weapons or arms/legs?

Working out tempers and what they should cost can be a fair bit of work, but you know what? Most brewing sellers don't bother to do any research. They charge almost as much for their tempers as you can get for the final completed items the tempers help make. Why would anyone buy something from you in order to make no profit, or even lose money once they factor their failure rate in? Try to think smart instead of greedy. Most brewers I see either sell out of all their stuff instantly or have it up at the same ridiculous prices for literally weeks or months.

Essence of sunshine is needed for a lot of things, and fairly difficult to get at a reasonable price. The first one that comes to my mind is as part of a temper for Fierce Heraldic armor. People mostly make it to order these days rather than keep a big stock on hand, and when someone wants to buy a finished piece, smiths often can't do a thing about it because they don't have the materials and probably won't be getting them anytime soon, at least not at a reasonable price if buying them. Passing up a chance to make 5 or 10 or 20k or more at a time has got to be aggravating for them. This armor is very good and has a wide market; you might want to keep a supply of temper made for it so that people can make the armor more readily. People will likely buy more than they need just so that they can meet an order for the armor if one comes in, so even if they don't need your entire stock, they might buy it anyway just to be safe. I know I do that with lots of the things I buy.

The cultural plate armor(BD armor) that sells the best on my server is Fierce heraldic(all ralloz-zek worshipping warriors, which is to say MOST warriors -- humans and ogres included, as well as some bards); darkscale armor(crimson, blackened, and fulvous) for troll and ogre warriors and shadowknights; and Dark Prince Regent I think it's called, for dark elves, who are probably still the majority of shadowknights out there after all these years. That's three kinds of tempers you could probably sell for a nice amount of profit. Even smiths who are master brewers themselves would probably be more than happy to buy reasonably priced tempers, as it keeps them in the smithing game. Their 250 skill is worthless without the tempers needed to actually fill an order or keep their bazaar mule stocked.

Blue diamond armor requires celestial tempers as well as cultural tempers. That's something you won't just sell to one race/religion of smith, but potentially to all of them.

Well, that's a start.

And keep in mind that you might want to do a little bit of everything, organized around a certain theme. Give people a variety of things within that theme to buy from you, and they will learn to stop by often. I call this my cross-pollination strategy.

I used to bake and brew stat foods and drink a lot, and made more money when I did runs of both at the same time. I would turn myself into a one-stop refreshment shop. People coming over to buy some halas meat pies or misty thicket picnics might see some grobbs liquidized meats on me and go, ah, what the heck, might as well -- and I'd get a customer to buy two items since I made everything easy. Heck, since it usually wasn't as easy to get as good a choice of food and drink as I provided, people often stocked up when they saw the opportunity. People coming for Ping's Fuzzlecutter saw fishrolls too -- hmm, perfect combo!

Similarly, now that I am a max smith, I make all kinds of armor and some weapons, too. Now I'm the shop for people who like to punch you in the face. Any melee who comes to me for, say, one sword or another might buy it, or while scrolling through my inventory find I have a piece of armor he wants more than he wants the sword, or he might buy both or make plans to buy something else I have, that he until that point hadn't even heard of or known he might want, as soon as he can scrape up the cash. People come for the Tae Ew items and find out I make some pretty nice ogre cultural, and vice-versa. I even make stuff that on my server now is pretty much a zero-profit item, Tae Ew legs and tunics, just to draw in business to my other goods. I'll be back later! lots of people /tell me. And, How long are you gonna be online? People learn that I tend to keep a wide variety of smithed goods, and look me up every once in a while to see what's new, or if some jerk has started a price war and I've moved down to match or beat their prices. I get a fair amount of repeat customers and people who know who to come to for stuff for their friends and twinks.

Anyway, it helps to let people construct a picture in their minds of you as a trader. Most traders carry an ever-changing stock of lord knows what, the very rare gem in a sea of garbage, so why would you bother thinking about ever going back to them once you've bought a single item from them? I make my own stuff mostly, so I can be consistent. I was Joe's Eats, now I'm Crazy Eddie's Armory. If you've visited my trader once and seen anything you liked, chances are you'll either look me up or make a beeline for me the next time you zone into the bazaar as well.

By the way -- keep your mule in the same place each day.

[Hobbun]

I'd go with the low stuff in mass quanties to start off.

Celestial essense (no-fail combine), cost under 2pp to make. Sell them at 4pp and double your money.

Leather padding, silk swatches, etc. Anything that requires (a) farming and (b) very easy combines.

There is a guy on my server selling the Blessed Dust of Tunare for 50pp each (total cost, about 20pp). He's making a killing! Everyone (me included) is trying to skill up on Solstice robes. Making the dust requires-
1. Cleric or druid to imbue emeralds (very time-consuming)
2. Making celestial essense (easy, but still time-consuming)
3. Combining the imbued emerald + celestial essense + jar of acid (purchased) in kiln (pottery skill check).

He had over 400 of the one day! (just makes my wrist hurt thinking about it). The next day he had less that 100 left.

I made my money by being the best High Elf Smith around. I do have some other people selling armor, but I was the 1st to make the BD cultural and I'm still the only one at 250 as far as I know.

What server are you on btw, Zacatac?

Hobbun

[Hobbun]

I'd go with the low stuff in mass quanties to start off.

Celestial essense (no-fail combine), cost under 2pp to make. Sell them at 4pp and double your money.

Leather padding, silk swatches, etc. Anything that requires (a) farming and (b) very easy combines.

There is a guy on my server selling the Blessed Dust of Tunare for 50pp each (total cost, about 20pp). He's making a killing! Everyone (me included) is trying to skill up on Solstice robes. Making the dust requires-
1. Cleric or druid to imbue emeralds (very time-consuming)
2. Making celestial essense (easy, but still time-consuming)
3. Combining the imbued emerald + celestial essense + jar of acid (purchased) in kiln (pottery skill check).

He had over 400 of the one day! (just makes my wrist hurt thinking about it). The next day he had less that 100 left.

I made my money by being the best High Elf Smith around. I do have some other people selling armor, but I was the 1st to make the BD cultural and I'm still the only one at 250 as far as I know.

What server are you on btw, Zacatac?

Hobbun

[Zacatac]

Bristlebane

[Aethia]

Being on the newbie server (Stromm) I can tell you things are pretty much the same as everyone has pointed out here.

There are a handful of people selling MTP around 4 pp and that's about it on the high end (at least when I am on playing - located in Europe). But I can tell you, the basics sell. They ALWAYS sell, regardless of what server I play (Inny, Test, Stromm). My human monk on Inny was a consumer, my necro on Stromm is the 'trader'. It's amazing what sells and for how much. My necro is only 31, but I have made some decent money selling research components (not exactly a tradeskill, but....). In the process of merchant mining for words, runes, etc., I come across some amazing items, some which sell, some don't.

Pelts - the market is priced JUST slightly above merchants - 1 silver for a ruined pelt on a merchant, 5 silver in the bazaar. Same is true on the other qualities - so this is a win for tradeskillers and a win for traders. Granted not as much profit as if they sold for 5 pp, but a profit nonetheless.

For example, jum jum spiced beer on Inny sells very well in the bazaar. On Stromm, not a nudge. But even though I bought it off a merchant (1 stack = 3 gold) I am not at a loss. I can use them for making MTP myself when I get high enough or drink them to raise my alcohol tolerance

It takes money to make money, and while I haven't made much with my trader (about 500 plat in a week on Stromm during non peak US times), I am having a BLAST, looking for items, pricing them and seeing what happens. It's really cool when you are looking for Item A and see Item B on a merchant. My best find is "A broom" for 1 plat - used for Mage Pet Focus Item quest.

I agree with the advice to do tradeskills because you want to. It's no fun clicking and clicking just to make something and find out that the market has dropped. But it is cool seeing something made and selling that item, even if it is just 'break even'.

Have fun with it and the money will follow. How much will follow you, I can't tell, since I'm not a fortune teller

Good luck.

[Raiyaeq]

If you are willing to farm spend load of time, then tradeskill is a good way of making money.

When market is flood with an item, i.e. solstice robe for 50pp, you hold out. It'll change eventually. I've seen many times on vaz that robes, sickles can be at 500 each, but then a week later, they are back to 2k. Market only floods when there are multiple people raising skill up with the same item. The demand is always there, just have to sit tight and wait. (mainly for PoTC gifts).

As a wood elf, your option of making profit from doing tradeskills are tailoring, smithing, fletching.

There are some nice items that you can make with GM skills. If you have some money, but not a lot, I'd say to do Fletching. You won't be able to make as much as money as if you do tailoring or smithing, but it'll be a good start. If you really willing to farm your own stuff, tailoring would be a good one.

Tunarean cultural armor, velious high end tailoring items that you can farm and xp on at lvl 52 (wyverns, panthers - might be a bit low, not sure what their exact lvl is), if you can hold the market, the cash will just flowing in with people ask you for combines. From my experience, I can make average 5-15k per week just by people bring me things to combine. I normally charge 500-3k per combine depends on the items.

Good luck with your tradeskill advanture, it won't be an easy route, you have to work it, love it, and it'll pay out "eventually".